Smoke grenades are canister-type grenades used as ground-to-ground or ground-to-air signaling devices, target, or landing zone marking devices, or as screening devices for unit movements. Smoke grenades generally have a sheet steel cylinder with at least one emission hole to allow smoke release when the grenade is ignited. Smoke grenades can be either tossed by hand or launched from a firearm. The body of hand tossed smoke grenades is often filled with hexachloroethane, which makes thick heavy black smoke.
Conventional launched grenades have the benefit of traveling farther than hand tossed smoke grenades, providing significant accuracy and range advantages. However, the difficulty with using hexachloroethane in a launched smoke grenade is that hexachloroethane must be kept physically separated from a starter composition for the grenade to work properly. The starter composition must both be easily ignited by the propellant charge and burn at a sufficiently high temperature to penetrate the barrier separating the starter composition from the hexachloroethane.
Therefore, a need exists for a new and improved launched smoke grenade that uses hexachloroethane to produce smoke. In this regard, the various embodiments of the present invention substantially fulfill at least some of these needs. In this respect, the launched smoke grenade according to the present invention substantially departs from the conventional concepts and designs of the prior art, and in doing so provides an apparatus primarily developed for the purpose of providing a smoke grenade that is launched from a firearm and uses hexachloroethane to produce smoke.